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Could Open Source Investment Save HP?
deadeyefred writes "HP's new CEO, Meg Whitman, has a number of issues to deal with to right the ship and put the company on a growth track again. Instead of massive changes to its organization and product line, could $4.5 billion in open source investments do the trick? An argument might be made that HP could boost its competitiveness by putting half of its R&D budget ($1.5 billion a year) into projects like Xen.org, Android and OpenStack. It would still be less than half what HP is paying for Autonomy and allow it to focus on solving problems rather than protecting proprietary product lines and fiefdoms."
Man, what a dream that would be! A company that focuses on solving problems for customers, and doesn't try to own every little crappy angle to squeeze their customers!
Seriously, imagine if HP took *every* possible open source option in building a PC, and opened as much of the system as possible to allow crowd sourcing of solutions to the problems that always pop up in systems! Now with Windows, that would still be pretty limited. But hey! This would be a company I could buy from!
Red Hat - Yes...
IBM - Yes...
It's all in how you go about it all.
However...
Sun screwed up and didn't "get it" quick enough to turn it around for themselves. Starting late on the game and/or not having a handle on it costs dearly.
Palm? OpenSource? I don't see a fully FOSS WebOS. I don't see a fully FOSS PalmOS either.
Netscape? They FOSSed things as they were DYING.
Your examples aren't.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I'm afraid you'll have to wait the obligatory week for your chance. The HP board is trying as hard as it can to match the CEO replacement cycle with the Mozilla release cycle, so give them a chance.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sun's problem wasn't because they contributed to Open Source. The problem with Sun was that they couldn't be bothered with making money.
Oracle made their operations profitable within a year without any significant changes to their open source projects. Or in other words, had they chosen to support all the same open source efforts, the changes in marketing and management Oracle introduced still made sun profitable.
IBM contributes heavily to open source, and in fact might be the biggest contributor to open source, and they are quite profitable.
Google contributes heavily to open source, and they are quite profitable.
Companies that contribute to Open Source just cannot make that their *entire* business plan.
IBM contributes heavily to open source, and in fact might be the biggest contributor to open source, and they are quite profitable.
Due to their proprietary hardware and software that they sell. Not due to open source.
Actually, that's not true. In 2010, IBM earned $58.7 billion from its business services, technology services, and finance divisions, compared to $40.5 billion for its software and systems and technology divisions. So most of IBM's money comes from consulting and services, in which might involve proprietary products as well as open source software. IBM's policy is to offer its customers solutions that are the best fit for their needs and budgets -- that is, they'll bleed you as much as they can, but if it makes the most sense to use open source software, they'll use that.
Also, even some of IBM's proprietary software is open source. Let me repeat that: Even some of the software that you describe as "proprietary" also comprises open source elements. Not every open source license forbids commercial use. For example, IBM's WebSphere Application Server bundles a modified version of the Apache HTTP server (unless you want to use something else). In reverse, IBM has donated a number of products to the Apache Foundation, and these are usually mature packages that IBM was already deploying for real-world projects (e.g. CloudScape, aka Derby) and continues to use today -- now IBM just gains the benefits of community development. To the extent that Java is also open source, IBM is obviously heavily involved in the Java Specification Process (even if it has its own, proprietary Java products).
So you really can't claim IBM isn't a good open source citizen, and you can't claim IBM isn't profiting from its decision to embrace open source,either (where appropriate). Consider this: In 2010, IBM earned $22.5 billion from its software business. You know what it's gross profit margin from that business was? 86.9 percent. That's right, 86.9 percent. Think open source had nothing to do with that?
The open source part is just leveraged to sell more proprietary hardware and software.
Correction: The open source part is just leveraged -- or, if we can drop the bullshit MBA jargon, it's used to make money. What's wrong with that? I thought that was the whole topic of the thread.
Breakfast served all day!
There was a time in which HP had a corporate identity that would have fit well with open source. They made great hardware, mostly for professionals. Now they're just another mish-mash jack of all trades tech company that needs to sell consumer products to a disappearing middle class in order to thrive. It doesn't really stand a chance. The only tech company dependent on selling to consumers that's doing well in the last several years is Apple, because they're selling luxury goods.
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I am not sure this is a useful guide to what HP would do. After all, some of Apple's software is also open source; witness the Apache Server bundled with all the stuff on my Mac laptop. You quote numbers which look authoritative, but we don't know how much of consulting and services is attributable to open source and how much is attributable to proprietary, so they don't really make the case for open source.
It's worth noting that Sun under Schwartz had a plan for open source software, it just did not succeed. As related at the time, the goal was to use open source as a lever into Brazil/Russia/India/China and other places, and then sell other stuff. The goal was that almost all software would be open sourced, under the theory that most of Sun's paying customers (not to be confusing with non-paying non-customers) really didn't have a choice to just download their stuff from the net and service it themselves, either because of expertise issues, or regulatory issues, or quirky-customization issues. That is, Schwartz was pretty explicitly buying into the notion that non-paying software users need not represent lost sales, because the bulk of those users would not pay for it under any circumstances (unlike, say, the RIAA, MPAA, or BSA). They were serious about this; they flew a mess of people out to Santa Clara in late 2007 for a several-day open source summit, and I have 60 pages of notes that I took there.
Obviously the plan didn't work, but it was a plan, and it had connectable dots. My thinking is anyone proposing open source to save HP's business, had better be able to outline a plan that is better than Schwartz's outline to us.
I'd like to see the HP train stop wrecking. I have some friends who work there. There's lovely schadenfreude in seeing overpaid board members making stupid mistakes, till you notice that it's not their jobs that are on the line.
Sun's plan worked brilliantly. They dominated workstation markets pretty much everywhere, and their open source policy was central to that. The main reason for Sun's early success (remember how they killed Apollo?) was they just ran the same software that all the universities were using. I remember how my own code just ran on the things... it was awesome. Their open-source policy, which was long before the phrase "open source" was coined, enabled them to trash the competition. Then they got big, and as the number one company in their space, they got cold feet about open source. IMO, the single biggest mistake Sun ever made was to take Berkeley Unix private, and relabel it Sun-OS (and later, Solaris). It was unbelievably super-dumb. Had they kept it open, there never would have been any compelling reason for Linux, much less BSD. My guess is that they realized their mistake, and tried to the end to make up for it by becoming radical supporters of open source. It was too little, too late. However, it wasn't that their open source strategy failed. It was their choice of back-stabbing the community that killed them. Well, that and Moore's Law, and the lack of an evil marketing genius like Jobs.
Anyway, Meg isn't the marketing genius HP needs. She pretty much is a nail in the coffin.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell